Yeah, Steve, I find "wanker" pretty amusing too, but I never heard of "tosser" until I was on Mudcat.

You said, "i personally think that Britain is eating itself from within with this racial obsession"

So do I. I think that the whole damn western world is eating itself from within with racial obsession. It's ridiculous. People should focus on their similarities, not their differences, if they wish to have a healthy psychology and good relations with one another. They should not isolate themselves into what are really just defensive tribal groupings under the illusion that this somehow elevates them or serves their "racial pride".

Here is a marvelous piece of writing on the subject that I found on a movie reviewing website:

The ethos of the film *(In the Heat of the Night), by which I mean the values it examines, are locked into the 1960s, and even earlier. I recall hitchhiking through the South (Maryland, actually) and still seeing signs at the time reading "Colored Only" over the rest rooms. And an African-American friend who took pictures of such arrangements being followed out of town by a short string of local cars and stopped for questioning. The film reflects a dangerous and hate-filled time which Southerners have finally overcome, thank God. And yet this same ethos lives on in the minds of many Southern whites and even more African-Americans, not reflected in on-the-ground behavioral reality, but in beliefs. I taught for years in a Southern mostly African-American university before I came to realize how important this myth is to blacks. To ask them, or anyone else, to give up that history of persecution is to ask them to sacrifice a solidarity that is otherwise unattainable. There is "us" and then there is "them". And "they" are the enemy which draws us together and from which we gain support and succor. There is not much segregation in the South or elsewhere (although it still exists), but there might as well be. From the point of view of African-Americans, there almost NEEDS to be. Don't human organizations need a history of persecution? The Christians have Nero, Jews have four thousand years of it, including the holocaust, Irish have the British occupation, Moslems have the hejira, Mormons have the assasination of Smith. We -- who have once been treated unjustly -- have Victim Power. You can't understand us unless you've walked a mile in our moccasins. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead once chatted and published their views in "A Rap on Race." They both agreed that we need to disregard the past (not forget it) and start anew. Of course, no one remembers the book or its message because it flies in the face of social dynamics. The hell with that, I want to feel persecuted!

There is the crux of the problem. Instead of learning from the past and moving beyond its limitations, moving on to a completely fresh understanding of shared brotherhood, people seem to prefer to wallow in the past, to recycle the hatred and blame, and to perpetuate the sense of victimhood and accusation, generation after generation.    For them issues of race become an abiding obsession that eats them up from within. They want their children to carry their pain and anger forward. This isn't a helpful attitude to pass on to children.

By the way, the above passage was taken from a very positive review of "In the Heat of the Night", a brilliant movie with Sydney Poitier, outstanding in that it does not stoop to preachy and cardboard stereotyping of racism, but shows it in both its crude and its more subtle manifestations. Both the redneck white sherriff AND the more enlightened black police officer from Philadelphia are shown to be carrying racial prejudice...but in the case of Poitier's character it is far more subtle...and even he is surprised when directly confronted with his own prejudice, his own desire to "get even", not least because it interferes with him being able to do his job as he would want to...impartially and with total objectivity. He and the southern sherrif both become wiser men and they learn to respect and even like one another by the end of the film...not as a northern black man and a southern white man, but as two flawed human beings who recognize the good points and value in one another, despite the flaws. That's something to see. It's a wonderful movie.